Meet Dave
Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Kevin Hart
Directed by Brian Robbins
20th Century Fox 2008
90 minutes
Meet Dave is an Eddie Murphy comedy that doesn’t suck. This is rather surprising as recent Murphy movies are the black hole of comedy. Yes, that was a fart joke: this is an Eddie Murphy movie. Fortunately, this comedy is far superior to that. The proof is there are only two fart jokes in Meet Dave and they are about an hour apart. In fact, this DVD is really quite good.
Our review of Meet Dave Blu-ray
Though Meet Dave is the old strange fish out of water and in a stranger place story, this comedy is quite original. The setup allows the movie to excuse all the overacting and bad mimicking Eddie Murphy is now famous for, but this comedy does not only rely on this prepackaged excuse and has quite a few very original, funny moments.
In the story, Planet Nil sent an orb to earth to suck out its oceans: the Nils need salt or they will die. The orb got lost. The Nils send Dave a human-size replica of Eddie Murphy that is in fact a robot controlled from the inside by small, human looking creatures. The captain is Murphy so the ‘bot looks like him.
If Dave finds the orb and it sucks out the oceans, Earth will perish. Unless, of course, he finds a reason why it should not.
Dave / Eddie Murphy meet a single mom and her son and a few predictable plot points. The son’s room just happens to be where the orb crashed. There are also a few funny surprises in store.
The comedy on this DVD comes from the fact the Nils are woefully uninformed about earth and humans and do not know how to act, from what goes on inside Dave and the people that operate him, and from the original writing.
Meet Dave is a surprisingly different, quite entertaining, and almost family friendly comedy (there is a bit of violence near the end). This movie does not overstay its welcome and even makes you want to watch it again
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